07/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The French filmmaker spoke to us about the symbolic figure of the vampire, the blend of genres in her movie and the impossibility of fitting in with society’s normative false pretences

(© Manuel Moutier)

For Night Will Come [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Céline Rouzet
film profile], Céline Rouzet’s fiction feature film after her documentary A Distant Thud in the Jungle [+see also:
trailer
film profile], was presented within the 80th Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition.

Cineuropa: Where did you get the idea to blend a vampire film with a family film and a teen movie?
Céline Rouzet: My family was hit by a tragedy a few years ago and I found the most powerful way to talk about it was through fiction. That’s why making a genre film made sense. I love the lyricism and romance it allows: you can exacerbate situations, the intensity of emotions and sensations… But it also allows you to distance yourself from realities which can be really cruel and harsh; in this particular case, to distance myself from my own story, which I would never have been able to tell in a realist form. Vampires are really interesting figures, because they’re fragile, misunderstood monsters who frighten people and whose condition is invisible at first glance. In films, they’ve often represented dissent, marginality and are often really erotic, and very cinegenic too. In my film, I treat vampirism as if it’s just as mysterious as an orphan disease or a disability at birth. It’s practically a case study: what happens when a boy who has all the symptoms of being a vampire turns up with his family in a quiet, straightforward and incredibly normative suburban town?

How did you want to depict the family’s approach, who accommodate the complications of day-to-day life with their vampire son as best they can?
I wanted to explore the impossibility of an abnormal boy and his family integrating into a community, and how that family is prepared to make all kind of sacrifices to protect him, but also how they might be suffocating him by always trying to help him to do everything he can to be normal, to integrate, to fit the mould, which means betraying yourself and also dying a little bit. I wanted people to understand the strangeness of this family, and I worked really hard to achieve that in the screenplay with William Martin. From the outset, we had to ensure this rather unique family came across as really touching, endearing, a little bit insincere, joyfully messy at home… We worked on the film’s dramatic irony: we’re in on their lies, we see them steal blood, etc. It had to be exhilarating and we had to find a touch of light and humour in it all, even if the tension, malaise and drama ramp up over time, because they’re a family of exhausted fighters who are giving it one last try and who are running into brick walls trying to do everything for this boy to have a good life. We had to make sure we didn’t ever lose tension or the sense of danger, because, at the end of the day, this is a serious story which is full of gravity. The blend of genres helped with this, because I could inject romantism too, a bit of light through love. The film also explores false social pretences and conventions which conceal brutality, but it also follows a family who are lying by trying to act as if they’re just like everyone else.

What kind of atmosphere were you looking to create?
The film is haunted by Philémon’s emotions and outlook on the world, an outlook full of desire and danger, so the film continually swings between violence and a certain sensuality, a tenderness. I wanted compound clips, slick camera movements, vibrant colours and a slight detachment from reality by introducing a bit of oneirism and lyricism; and light with a touch of fantasy about it, to show that theirs is a bit of a troubled world, that there’s something imperceptible hanging over them. My aesthetic references were Virgin Suicides, Call Me by Your Name [+see also:
trailer
Q&A: Luca Guadagnino
film profile] and, to a certain degree, It Follows. We also needed to make the daytime dangerous and for the shadows and nighttime to be a refuge. We looked to achieve this through the decor of the lush but isolated suburban town (because we have to cross a bridge and then a forest to get to it), in all its terrifyingly perfect smoothness and colour, its troubling strangeness, its slightly exaggerated smiles. But we also used sound for the forest, namely jungle noises and animals noises from the Far West.

The film makes direct references to Kathryn Bigelow, George Romero and William Friedkin, to name a few.
It’s quite playful, but it’s always in keeping with the film. I’m really attached to art house cinema, but also to more popular references, such as to Spielberg, and genre cinema with political resonance.

(Translated from French)